Rise of the Beast: A Novel (The Patmos Conspiracy Book 1) (6 page)

All was silent again. She bent her head to the task at hand.

Aim, shoot, turn the page.

12

New York City

BURKE WANTED TO SCREAM IN exultation. Had she done it? Had she pulled it off? The green light on his iPad app signaled she was transmitting.

I think I love you Pauline.

Did he just think that? Did he love her? If so, he had a funny way of showing it. Realistically, when you combine a beautiful woman with tons of stress, you’re sure to come up with crazy ideas.

Shut up, Burke. Keep your focus. You still haven’t got her out of there. Get the goods. Get the girl. Then do a dance—and figure out how to keep her and yourself alive.

He had checked into a hotel in Harlem under one of his many names near the Columbia University Hospital. When he checked out of his hotel in Manhattan he had spent almost an hour walking, stopping, changing directions, descending steps into subway stations and bounding up the stairs a block away, watching for suspicious movements in the reflections of store windows, and other counter surveillance measures until he was absolutely certain he wasn’t being followed.

Burke had inserted an app in Pauline’s phone that instantly transmitted any pictures she took to a secure website with an invisible and encrypted IP address only he could access. From there
it automatically forwarded to an equally secure web folder that could only be opened by whoever was paying him.

The man with the metallically altered voice who is trying to pinpoint my location.

His client wanted to be the first and only one to see anything found in Alexander’ diary, but the fortune being paid wasn’t enough to let Burke be careless, even with those paying the bills. He had done that once before. One false step and he was a dead man. Heck, he might be the walking dead already.

So he rigged the program to keep a copy of anything his client got for himself. Insurance.

Burke was raised in Nixa, Missouri, where he was taught each week in Sunday School to eschew the sin of greed—and run from a whole host of other temptations he had succumbed to as well. But greed might be what exactly was going to kill him before his time to face his Maker.

He stared at the screen, raising a cup of coffee to his lips. One image uploaded.

Keep going Pauline.

A second image. He put the coffee cup down and raised his fists in the air.

Don’t stop now. I’ll get you out of there if it’s the last thing I do. Tonight.

The third image. He forced himself to stay seated, ready to bounce from wall to wall in the small room.

I won’t even hire this job out completely. I’ll be part of the extraction team myself.

Four. Five. Six.

Good work baby. We’ll disappear after this is over. We’ll have a long talk. We’ll start from scratch.

If she was shooting two pages per shot, how many pages had Pauline sent him? Eleven? Maybe twelve?

He watched the screen breathlessly. Nothing. Maybe a slow satellite Internet connection? He started counting the seconds. Twenty. Twenty-one. Twenty-two. Twenty-three. Twenty-four. Twenty-five. Twenty-six. Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine. Thirty. Nothing.

Why had she stopped?

C’mon Pauline. Just aim and push the button. Doesn’t have to be perfect.

He watched in stillness for another thirty seconds. Still nothing. Another minute passed. An excruciatingly long minute. His heart began to sink. He stood and stretched his back. He picked up a pillow and punched it. He slowed his breath and sat back down.

He scanned the images quickly. Two pages for every picture except for the first. He had just eleven pages in total. Surely the man wrote more than that in his leather journal. His client seemed certain that Alexander’s journal was the Holy Grail of corporate espionage. Eleven pages? Had to be more.

What’s happening Pauline? Why have you stopped? I know you aren’t finished.

He stared at the short column of six static, unblinking icons on the computer screen. Even as he racked his brain for explanations he knew better. The program was failsafe. His stomach knotted up in a tight ball. He tasted bile in the back of his throat.

Pauline, I know you said yes of your own volition, but I’m sorry I put you in harms way. Just talk to me. What is happening Pauline?

13

Hodeidah, Yemen

NICKY MET HIS MAN AT a small café on the south side of Hodeidah, the closest town to the port of Mokha. He would like to be closer to the spot where he would climb aboard a speedboat to depart the dust and sand of Yemen, but the port only had one main pier with no commerce.

Platters of humus, grilled halloumi, tabbouleh, shish tawook, and dolma rested on the table between them. Nicky was ravished. He had lost fifteen pounds during his sixty-day tour of the Arabian Peninsula. He forced himself to slow down his chewing and count to five between bites. With a high speed boat ride ahead of him, he didn’t want to sabotage his stomach’s attempts to hold down the product of gestation.

The man across from him barely touched the food. His eyes smoldered in rage. He was the youngest son of Sheikh Sulaymon and the brother of the handsome Arabian prince who died at the hands of Malmak. Nicky was surprised the old man had sent Labeeb to acquire the precise location of Malmak and his warriors. Labeeb meant sensible and intelligent—two qualities that Nicky suspected the young man missed out on at birth. The kid was of an age to head to Europe or America for college, but he was a fanatic who didn’t understand the
long game. Why waste four or five years in study when you could be killing enemies of Allah and the tribe right now? The old man should know that there was a decent chance Labeeb would go Rambo and seek to avenge his brother in a solo kamikaze attack.

Nicky and his uncle fought over the same issues when Nicky was eighteen. In his case, he couldn’t wear his uncle down. The fact that this kid was marching toward the front line of war rather than being secured on a safe university campus told him something about Sulaymon as well. He did not possess his uncle’s strength and will. He doubted Sulaymon would be a player in the bloodbath that was to come. He was just one or two steps up the food chain from Malmak.

Of course, twenty years later, Nicky still forced his way to the front lines to his uncle’s consternation. He looked at Labeeb closer.

He won’t be alive in a week. Time for you to grow up and do your work from a distance.

What the kid did or didn’t do was irrelevant to Nicky. One more casualty from a minor player in his uncle’s grand drama was nothing.

What amazed Nicky most was that in exchange for telling Sulaymon where Malmak was encamped, he was bringing home a huge payday that would largely fund the weapons he had delivered to the man who had killed his eldest son.

That was the beauty of his uncle’s plan. Pit both sides against each other. Let them do the dirty work—and pay the bill. Priceless.

Nicky would return the check for a bottle of beer or glass of wine to wash down the delicious local fare. Not smart and not possible. And it was definitely time to go. Every minute he remained on the peninsula was tempting fate. He had three men watching his back, including the Chechnyan military officer who deserted Malmak’s camp the previous night.

“You aren’t paying me enough to lose my head to a madman.”

“Things are happening faster than planned,” Nicky told him, giving him instructions on where to meet him in Hodeidah.

“Do I still get paid full amount?”

“Of course. And there will be more work for you soon. We’ll leave together from the port. You’ll go to Paris and await further instructions.”

Nicky slid the sheath of papers across the table to Sulaymon’s youngest prince. The kid studied the grainy night vision photographs carefully. He glanced at the summary page that gave the exact coordinates of Malmak’s small military base.

“Tell me again how you got these—and why you are giving this information to us?”

Did Sulaymon give the young man instructions to ask these questions or was he thinking through all that had transpired in past two days on his own? He hoped the former.

“You already know how we came by this information. We are expanding our business in Yemen and are paying for information from many sources. You also know why we are passing on this information to your father. He is paying us a significant sum of money.”

The young man’s face was a mask of conflicting thoughts and emotions. It was obvious his suspicions weren’t satisfied by Nicky’s answers. But what could he do? How long would Malmak wait before moving against Sulaymon? He was there as emissary of his father. He had to make the deal. Nonetheless, Nicky gave an imperceptible nod to the Chechnyan. Be ready to shoot anything that moves, including the kid, if this goes south.

The young man scowled and slid an envelope across the table to Nicky.

“Do you want to verify the wire transfer details and instructions?”

Indeed, Nicky wanted him to, but knew everything would be in order. Sulaymon was not going to risk losing an immediate chance to avenge his anointed one. Nicky shook his head no, stood, gave a small bow, and answered, “Not necessary. I trust your father. I know that he knows what is at stake.”

“As we trust you know what is at stake.”

The two men locked eyes and glared at each other. Nicky almost wanted Labeeb to make a move at him so he could let the boy know his proper place in the universe. He knew what his uncle would do. Defer in order to win the battle that mattered. Nicky broke eye contact and nodded to the young man, granting Labeeb the victory.

Nicky hated to leave the uneaten food behind, but it was time to get out of Yemen with his head intact.

“It is a sin to waste food, Labeeb. Refresh yourself and then do your duty.”

Labeeb was already out the door.

He and the Chechnyan walked to the door, checking all directions for ambushes. Nicky scanned upstairs windows across the street. Nothing. All was clear.

He took a quick step back in the café and grabbed a skewer of shish tawook before trotting out the door and jumping in the jeep to head for the pier.

14

The Isle of Patmos

IN GREEK AND ROMAN MYTHOLOGY, the Chimera combined parts of the lion, goat, and serpent to form a monster.

What better base to build a three-headed Chimera on than Ebola? First discovered in the Ebola region of the Congo, scientists knew that like rabies, salmonella, tuberculosis, Lyme, and a long list of other zoonotic diseases—diseases transmitted from animals to humans— it was hosted by an African animal. But which animal? Lyme came through tics, so treatments could be designed. But finding the exact source of Ebola wasn’t nearly so easy to identify—and that made prevention and treatment protocols much more difficult.

More than thirty years after Ebola first grabbed international headlines no one actually knew its source and natural incubator. Despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars on research, scientists also didn’t know how to treat the hemorrhaging disease that killed 80% of those it infected. Scientists still didn’t know why some people survived it either. But that was a small matter, Dr. Claire Stevens thought. Close counted in horseshoes, hand grenades, and Ebola.

It met all reasonable standards of successful lethal application to major population concentrations.

The most significant research into Ebola, at least for her needs, was done in the Soviet Union in the 1980s and early 90s at the State Research Center for Virology and Biotechnology, secreted away in Siberia. While everyone else worked on a vaccine, Soviet scientists worked on finding a solution to weaponize Ebola. The exchange of bodily fluids within human contact was a wonderful conduit of disease but not efficient enough. It was too easy to stop through quarantine. To survive you simply didn’t go near anyone bleeding their guts out and didn’t let them near anyone else. Fifteen million people were going to die through mass quarantine with a new outbreak in West Africa—she didn’t think, she knew—and that had nothing to do with their operation that was going to infect a new part of the world before anyone knew what was happening.

Before the collapse of the USSR, one of its best scientists had come close to putting it in an aerosol form. When the Berlin Wall fell signifying the death of the Empire, the program was disbanded.

Or so it seemed.

In 2004, Dr. Antonina Presnayakova, a scientist at the same facility, now privatized and heavily funded by American and European biotech companies, accidentally pricked her thumb with a needle laced with Ebola. She was purportedly working with Ebola infected guinea pigs to discover the elusive vaccine. She died ten days later, suffering convulsive hemorrhaging by herself in a quarantined white laboratory room.

Claire knew that Presnayakova was—despite the protests of conspiracy theorists—indeed working on a vaccine. But one of Presnayakova’s colleagues, Dr. Dimitri Dolzhikov, had resumed working on the aerosol version—the weaponized version—and she knew for a fact that he had sold his documentation and his services to Claire’s employer.

Her generous employer’s identity was a secret to everyone in the Patmos labs, except for the director, Dr. Rodger Patton. Shortly after
arriving, Claire proffered a guess, but the second she broached the subject with Patton, Rodger told her that such a line of inquiry was a certain path to termination. She wanted to ask what he meant by
termination
but held her tongue. That was the first time she understood the full implication of her decision to bring Mariama to the world. Did she regret it? Not in the least. Doing something great always conveyed a price. She kept her mouth shut on her suspicions.

It was irrelevant after she met Nicky. He was using a different first name and no last name. But she recognized him from a tabloid story she had read years before. Even before the pillow talk with Nicky began, she knew almost as much about their employer as Patton did.

Claire’s specialty was biological chemistry and to the delight of the small team she worked with, she quickly made her mark by dramatically increasing the absorption rate of airborne Ebola. Her lab partners had already enhanced the Ebola strain with the addition of anthrax to increase the kill rate from eighty percent to almost ninety percent. They were killing chimpanzees like clockwork in the lab. But results in open air spaces were desultory, threatening the project’s timetable.

She introduced an updated version of DMSO to the chimera. Dimethyl sulfoxide had little power to heal or harm in and of itself— though many a racehorse and Olympic athlete would swear to its effectiveness in reducing swelling and easing pain, thus speeding up the body’s recovery process. But what was absolutely known was that nothing penetrated both membrane and tissue damage-free, aiding in the body’s absorption of other medications, like the wood-based drug. It was so effective that any biological impurity in the ointment spread through the body like wildfire. It was a deadly disease’s best friend. It was banned by the FDA in the United States for anything other than transporting human organs, though the European Union allowed broader uses. It didn’t matter. Claire worked in a private lab located on a remote island in the Aegean Sea where it was impossible for curious
eyes to figure out what they had and what they might be doing—how can you observe something you are unaware of?

That was another reason her team had an almost unlimited supply of chimpanzees and gibbons to work with. Those were the two primates most susceptible to the HIV/AIDs virus, the benchmark for contagion, which meant no other research animal was more important to an epidemiologist, no matter how politically incorrect it was to run tests on them—or kill them.

When she first mentioned adding DMSO to the recipe her colleagues looked at her like she was crazy and scoffed at the idea, even the legendary Dr. Dolzhikov, the man who had aerosolized Ebola to a nascent level. DMSO had to be in a topical form to be efficacious they protested. But to Claire it was a simple matter of cells and molecules.

When she killed a gibbon with the toxic spray in an outdoor setting, not even downwind, rare bottles of the 1988 Dom Perignon were uncorked with dinner and Dolzhikov was the first to toast her.

Her recruiter, Rodger Patton, was subdued that night. Was he jealous? Possibly. A typical male response.

The only downside of adding DMSO was that no matter how it was introduced to humans, there was an immediate—and mysterious— taste and odor of garlic. Even her synthetically enhanced variant reeked of the bulb. Maybe she would look for causes. Or not. The odor symptom would barely be noticed by those who were to experience its ability to deliver the biological payload.

Claire Stevens had always known she was smart but still marveled at things she knew and could do that few other scientists would ever experience. How sad and mundane for them. She was working on the vanguard of technologies that would change the world. Correct that. Save the world.

Stevens earned an undergraduate and master’s degree in biology at University of Chicago. She stayed on Chicago’s south side to get a
Ph.D. in biological chemistry. She then traveled south to Nashville to get a second Ph.D. in epidemiology from Vanderbilt University.

That was ten years ago. She left Vandy wanting to get her hands dirty saving the world. She landed an ideal job in Boston with an NGO, GlobalHope, which was associated with Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital. The NGO funded a state of the art medical research lab and annual get-your-hands-dirty fieldwork for the small team of scientists. The $65 thousand starting salary was paltry, but GlobalHope also paid off her student loans. Nine months in the lab, three months in the field, and constant access to the greatest research university and hospital in the world. What could be better?

Through hard work and an open mind, she discovered a cause and support system that was so much grander than raking in big bucks. Money never was her motivation.

Patience, Mariana. Our time is coming soon.